There is a big shift in the podcast. The topics will still be awesome. We will still talk about photography websites, of course.

But Scott no longer has a co-host, and the mini-series within the podcast will be changing.

Oh, and each episode will now end with a question from the guest, for you to answer!

The first episode back was recorded live at Out of Chicago Photography Conference. The second was with Marc Silber from Advance Your Photography.

Check out the episodes and don’t forget to subscribe for more free education on WordPress and photography websites.

Focus Summit is a 3-day event, which you can join from the comfort of your studio, home office, or even on your couch.

Have a look.

As you can see, the photography summit has been well thought out and planned. There are a lot of incentives to join and learn.

And rumor has it that if you download their free eBook you will receive a really nice discount code of $50 off the cost of the event.

Join Rachel Brenke, Ben Hartley, The Youngrens, Christine Tremoulet, Blake Rudis and many others at Focus Summit.

Learn more or get started here.

The first is a Cart Menu Icon which has the ability to show with or without items in the cart. There is also the ability to show or not show the dollar amount in the cart. Here is a preview.

The other feature we want to share is a popular request from the community. Now you can turn on the ability for albums to open galleries directly in the Pro Lightbox. This is done per inserted gallery. Here is a preview.

The update is now available for all actively subscribed customers via the auto updater or within your account here on Photocrati.com.

We hope you enjoy the new features!

We are releasing a new NextGEN Gallery update every two or three weeks. We are focusing on improvements, bugs and compatibility. NextGEN Gallery now has support for our upcoming Lightroom plugin (more below).

NextGEN Pro now has coupon codes, tax options and free downloads.  For NextGEN Pro we are focusing on the most popular feature requests.

Print Lab integration is still underway. It’s one heck of a project.  We’d love your feedback on where to go with it, so please contact our support team with any requests you have for the project.

Our Lightroom plugin is out in private beta at the moment. We’re very close to the initial release. The plugin will be available on our Imagely site.  NextGEN Gallery will be required to use the Lightroom plugin (at least out of the gate).

Hosting is going well. We’ve brought on some heavy duty sites from some of the top photographers in the world.  We’d love to have you join as well!

We partnered with WhiteWall (a print lab based in Germany) on something really fun. Check that out here.

This October Scott will be teaching at two photography conferences and attending a third:

• Canada Photo Convention (Teaching)
• Out of New York Photography Conference  (Teaching)
• PhotoPlus Expo

The WordPress Photography Podcast is going strong. We’re at 21 episodes live and already aiming for 30!

We do not have an exact date when we’ll be releasing the updates. But stay tuned to the Imagely blog for those details, or expect an email once the releases are out.

Here’s what we’re working on:

• Simple tax support (DONE)
  • Tax percentage
  • Before/After Shipping
• Free Downloads
• $0 Products and Sales
• Coupon Codes
• Misc bug fixes

As always, if you have any feature requests, feel free to email support or vote for your desired features.

We’re also putting the final touches on our Lightroom plugin as I type this. Print lab integration is also coming along nicely!

So you might be wondering what is up next. We want to share our plans, but before we do you need to understand a little about our company.

History

Photocrati is a small team, with only 3 developers. You can learn about our team here.

For the past few years (since acquiring NextGEN Gallery), we’ve had 1 developer working on the theme and 2 working on the NextGEN products. In fact, it was more like this:

• Photocrati Theme: 1 developer
• NextGEN Gallery: 1 developer
• NextGEN Plus & Pro: 1 developer

As you might imagine, that slows down development speeds. Even with our developers helping each other out as needed.

(I forgot to mention we’re hiring developers!)

Up Next

The next step for the Photocrati Theme is to strip out the ability to create new galleries in the Photocrati gallery system that’s built into the theme.

The reason for this is because we will be offering NextGEN Pro to all currently subscribed Photocrati Theme customers with access to Photocrati Pro (aka Photocrati Theme 5.0).

That’s a HUGE advantage as the Ecommerce system in NextGEN Pro.

If you don’t know what NextGEN Pro is, check out the NextGEN Gallery website.

As you will see, NextGEN Gallery offers a huge advantage also for gallery management and features. There’s a centralized system for galleries and albums as well as the ability to manage and insert galleries or albums from any post or page.

NextGEN Pro comes with multiple gallery display types like you’ve seen in the Photocrati Theme, and then some!  For example, masonry is pretty popular in NextGEN Pro.

The Ecommerce aspect offers proofing, digital downloads, print sales, image protection and much more.

So you as you see, all the benefits of NextGEN Pro (valued at $99/yr) is worth the transition from the Photocrati gallery system.

Ok But Then

If you are still wondering why go through all of this if NextGEN Pro is already done. Why shouldn’t Photocrati customers just buy NextGEN Pro?

The simple answer if that you’re already paying a premium for the theme each year, and we don’t want you to have to pay 2 premiums each year.

But there is also one more huge advantage of you using NextGEN Gallery and NextGEN Pro over the Photocrati gallery system. We are working on integrating with some of the best print labs in the world.

Even better is that that integration will only be available to currently subscribed customers.

So if at any point you cancel your theme (or plugin) subscription then you would lose access to the lab integration, support and updates. But you could continue using the software with self-fulfillment.

For You

Our team is a mix of artists, photographers, painters, coders and just fantastic and amazingly nice people. And we are here for you.

Everything we do for our products is based on the popular requests that come from you.

So we continue to make sure you have a voice to be heard. We want to hear what you’d like to see in the theme in the future. We also want to hear what you want to see in NextGEN Gallery and NextGEN Pro.

So with that, here is how you can voice your opinion.

• For the theme, contact the theme support team with your feature requests
• For the plugin, complete the feature voting form with your feature requests

The Near Future

I started this talking about how our company is structured, in the development side. I also talked about how we are offering NextGEN Pro to all currently subscribed theme customers.

Here is what to expect in the near future…

Once we strip out the gallery system from the theme and offer NextGEN Pro to all subscribers, you will see very little activity on the theme for a while. Updates will mainly consist of any reported bugs that we confirm and also compatibility with WordPress and plugins as needed.

This will continue until lab integration is complete.

We decided to do this so that we can get this huge benefit out to all of our customers, like you.

With that said, we greatly appreciate your patience while we get lab integration complete and out for you.

And if you know any WordPress developers looking for a job, send them our way. Because if we find people that are the right fit for the team it could lead to faster development times and more of the features you want to see.

So within the next couple of months a new theme update will be out there for you. If your Photocrati Theme subscription is currently active then you’ll get the update and notice the gallery system removed. So you will no longer be able to create new Photocrati galleries. You will also notice the ability to quickly install NextGEN Gallery and to manually install your own licensed copy of NextGEN Pro.  Cool, right?

New Brand

Along with these changes comes a new brand.  That’s right, Photocrati is no longer the brand, but rather just a product we offer.

The new brand is Imagely, and we are very excited to introduce you to it. Under Imagely we’ll be offering our NextGEN Gallery, Plus and Pro series of plugins. As well as a full suite of new themes based on the Genesis framework.

We decided to work with the folks at Genesis on Child Themes rather than continuing the Photocrati framework for a few reasons.

For one, coding standards have changed a lot over the years and functionality like what is included in the Photocrati framework is now typically found in plugins. Hence the replacement with NextGEN Gallery and NextGEN Pro for Photocrati Pro users.

The Genesis framework is one of the most popular frameworks available for WordPress as well as being very secure and with a super fast load time.

So we will be building a variety of photography themes built on that framework.

Along with themes and plugins comes hosting. That’s right, hosting.

Imagely Hosting is launching soon and it will come with all of our themes and plugins and some extra goodies we will share pre-launch.

We’re also planning to start a podcast for photographers, all on WordPress.

Last, but not least, we’re working on a variety of educational materials like ebooks, courses and even potentially Lightroom and other post processing presets.

At Imagely we “Dream Big.”

Thank you

I want to end this with a huge thank you. Without you, your feedback, and your art, we would not be able to produce the products you’re using on your websites.

So here’s to you!